Amidst the hectic pace and chaos of modern life, we often forget the importance of family. Whether it is the family we are born into or one we build for ourselves, it is love that keeps us together. We must continue to cultivate this relationship if we were to maintain a healthy balance in life. Mid-Autumn Festival is an opportunity for Chinese families to reunite, and my family never fails to celebrate it with a feast. This year, with the upcoming first anniversary of the publication of my cookbook, Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees: Essential Techniques of Authentic Chinese Cooking, I’m expanding my celebration with a virtual feast to include my fellow North American bloggers, friends and food enthusiasts whom I consider as family.

As one of the most beloved food in the world, dumplings are universally enjoyed. Last week I had an opportunity to have great fun by spending an afternoon celebrating their goodness at the 12th Annual Chef One NYC Dumpling Festival. A wide variety of dumplings including Latin empanadas, Polish pierogies, Italian ravioli and Asian offerings with fillings from Korean, Japanese and Chinese cuisines were all offered for sampling. (As a disclosure I am paid to write this sponsored post.) I managed to eat too much that went beyond just sampling. But I was stuffing myself for a good cause. All of the proceeds go to support the Food Bank for New York City to provide hunger-relief.

Today is the autumnal equinox and that means summer is officially over. But with the unusually warm weather we’ve been enduring lately, it doesn’t feel like autumn at all. (What global warming?) Farmers’ markets throughout the city are still selling tomatoes, and Harlem watermelon vendors are still hawking this summer fruit at their sidewalk stalls. Last weekend I was delighted to find some wonderful looking celtuce, a summer vegetable, in Chinatown and thought that it was not too late to make soy-pickled celtuce.

How to celebrate the First Annual “National Dumpling Day” was a problem until I was invited to be a guest judge for the 12th Annual Chef One Dumpling Eating Contest, which is one of the highlights of the 2015 Chef One NYC Dumpling Festival. This year’s festival will be held from noon to 5pm on September 26th in Manhattan’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park (at Houston Street next to the Bowery branch of Whole Foods).

Today is the Qingming Festival (清明節) when Chinese families all over the world visit ancestral tombs to pay respect by cleaning them. Despite being one of the three major holidays celebrated by the Chinese, very few in the West understand its significance. It is such a vital holiday that controversial for hire tomb sweeping services are now available for migrant workers who are unable to return to their ancestral homes during this festival.

Across a very narrow strait from the downtown waterfront of Xiamen (廈門) sits the island of Gulangyu (鼓浪嶼), a hilly outcrop smaller than Central Park in New York City and dotted with colonial-era European style buildings. Warren and I took the short five-minute ferry ride to this island last month while we were in Xiamen. Gulangyu occupies a very special place in my heart because my father spent his formative years there attending the Anglo-Chinese Middle School in the 1930’s.

My family is originally from the coastal Chinese province of Fujian. Traditionally our noodles are cooked in soup, boiled unadorned except for seasonings, or stir-fried in a wok with a thin sauce. When I was about ten years old my family went to a Cantonese dim sum house in Singapore, which at that time was an exotic excursion for a family accustomed to mostly eating Fujianese food. We were served a pan-fried noodles dish of delicious seafood vegetable sauce dripping all over thin golden brown crispy noodles. That was the beginning of my life long love affair with Hong Kong pan-fried noodles.

Go to a Japanese noodle shop or a casual Korean restaurant and you’ll find two noodle dishes with very similar names: Jajangmyeon and Jajamen. Not unlike spaghetti Bolognese they consist of a bed of noodles topped with a brown ground meat sauce often accompanied by julienned cucumbers. Few people though realize that this dish originated in China. Known as Zhajiang Mian (炸醬麵) in Mandarin it is a classic snack food from the Beijing region.

Just south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn bounded by Church Avenue to the north, Coney Island Avenue to the west, Beverly Road to the south and the Q line subway track to the east is an oasis of Victorian residences. Known as Prospect Park South the area was built around the turn of the 20th century for discriminating New Yorkers looking for a suburban lifestyle. Our friends Lauren and Maureen fell in love with one of these houses when they were hunting for a home about a decade ago. It was a huge rambling grey house in need of repair with an overgrown garden in the back. Although they knew there was incredible potential for the house, it wasn’t until they started clearing the garden that they discovered the real treasure: raspberry brambles.

In Ba Jin’s (巴金) epic Chinese literary trilogy: Family, Spring and Autumn (家,春,秋), the author describes the life of a Chinese aristocratic family during the final years of the feudalistic Qing dynasty. It was a tumultuous time in which the family members had to negotiate changing political landscape as dynastic rule disintegrated, as well as the family’s own struggle between generations over changing values and aspirations. Ba Jin was a great observer and narrator of a China struggling within and without while falling into chaos at the beginning of the twentieth century. Among all the confusions and upheaval, there is one single constant and that is the communal family meal.